Tag: Feminism

I’m LITERALLY SHAKING. Do you have any idea how creepy and sickening it is when some weird, unknown person on the internet is going around talking about you to other people and sharing links to things you said publicly on the internet.

You know, like this:

Who is this “Brenda”, who is her anonymous “friend”, and how dare she read my public blog posts?!?!

I’m kind of “amused” too– that she thinks blue haired feminist was supposed to be an insult.

Now I have to go back to cyberstalking Shia LaBeouf because He Will Not Divide Us IS BACK but he isn’t there like the dancing monkey he’s supposed to be. 😡 Come back, Shia, Pepe is waiting for you!

Does this principle apply also to women who have sex drunk and who claim they otherwise wouldn’t have? How does this not cut out the heart of the idea that a woman who is drunk can be taken advantage of?

It’s hard to see in the screenshot but Mrs. Connolly is one of those people. The blue haired atheist feminist people.

With that in mind, there’s still a couple issues this piece raises. The stupidest first:

[If the rape victim] is an underclassman (freshman or sophomore), she has to hunt down a resident assistant (RA), whom she must beg for a curfew extension. If she goes to the hospital without first getting an extension, she may find herself in trouble with Student Life in the morning.

Hmmm, I was brutally assaulted; do I care what Student Life thinks?

Or, to put it another way, instead of being raped, you were stabbed. Are you going to hunt down your RA before calling an ambulance? If your college requires that, don’t go to that college.

The imaginary victim decides to go to the hospital to have a rape kit done but Connolly points out that it might not get tested. That’s not exactly encouraging. But maybe that won’t happen to this victim (spoiler: it does) and she still has to get to the hospital first:

Most students don’t have cars. She asks all the girls in her dorm, but most are already sleeping, or else not in yet. Odds are, she does not find a ride. There’s a sexual assault support nonprofit the next county over, Choices of Page County. They provide transportation to a hospital. Unfortunately, Front Royal is too far for them to come. She calls another nonprofit, The Laurel Center in Winchester, and is told that hospital transportation isn’t a service they’re equipped to provide.

So there’s nobody to take her to the hospital to get a rape kit done which won’t be tested anyway. She’s too polite to wake anyone up except for the RA she had to ask permission to leave from and the RA doesn’t have a car and can’t call or wake up someone who does.

But I can think of someone who could drive these poor girls to the hospital: the women who are part of the CASC and live in Front Royal. They should start their own version of Choices or volunteer to help add that service at the Laurel Center. Help people on a local level instead of being hashtag warriors and making new groups so they can help all the women at all the Catholic colleges. You know, subsidiarity right?

This is the other side of the coin from the Do Nothings I talked about earlier. Instead of writing articles or attacking people online, the CASC could be doing something to actively help the women they’re current trying to exploit, but SJWs destroy things. They don’t do constructive things. They’ll set up nonprofits they can leech off of, but start a van service for abused or endangered women in their own town? That’s work. They don’t have time. Are they empowered feminists or not? Start a group and recruit people who can do driving. Something like that would be far more helpful than Dinah’s Voice.

I would hope, should any one of them do something like this, that they wouldn’t turn away girls who were raped when they were drunk just because people with lowered inhibitions don’t do things they wouldn’t have done otherwise.

Now Thomas, one of the twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

I recently watched The Red Pill, Cassie Jaye’s documentary on the Men’s Right Movement (MRM) and Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs), and I found it rather a sad commentary on how far our culture’s view on the sexes is from where it ought to be.

The video seemed to have a twofold purpose: showing Cassie’s journey from being a feminist who viewed the MRAs as likely enemies or idiots to a not-feminist with sympathy for the MRAs and documenting what the Men’s Rights Movement was and what issues were important to these men. Ms. Jaye honestly showed her transformation and struggles to accept new-to-her facts and ideas. She listened and gained new understanding, and the audience could follow her along the path from rejection to acceptance or at least a state of being more opening and questioning about the narrative. Jaye interviewed many MRAs, sympathizers (including women), and even people who oppose the Men’s Rights Movement. The documentary was well done and easy to watch.

However, I didn’t find The Red Pill as informative about the Men’s Rights Movement as I had expected. Being already rather red-pilled myself, the men’s issues that the MRAs were so concerned about bringing to the world’s attention weren’t as surprising news to me, as they had been to Jaye. I felt sorry for these guys, but what I wanted to know was: what solution do you propose for this rotten state of affairs? Maybe they go into detail on their websites, but I haven’t had the time or inclination to look that up. The documentary didn’t answer that question.

One MRA leader made the point that if it weren’t for the Feminist Movement, the Men’s Rights Movement wouldn’t need to exist. That because things have been thrown out of balance, skewed in one direction, that the MRAs arose to be a counter weight to, hopefully, even things out. He said he was sorry that the MRM needed to exist at all.

A feminist who was interviewed remarked that the MRM was just a reaction to the Feminist movement. She was correct about that, but wrong about the motivations or reasons behind it. It isn’t that the men “feel threatened” by women and their new so-called “freedoms” and “power.” It is that to put themselves in a position of power, feminists have attempted to crush men under, to denigrate, and to be hateful towards men.

Many of the MRAs seemed happy to let women keep all the freedom and power they have, but want men to be treated equally. One of them began his journey into the Men’s Rights Movement from being a male feminist. Part of what they had to say bothered me; it’s not that men don’t deserve to be treated with the same dignity as women — of course they do — but some of the men seemed to lament that the burdens that have typically fallen to men still fall on masculine shoulders such as tough, dangerous jobs, being relied on to be the provider or even that women typically get custody in divorces because women are thought to be better at caring for children. These men seem to be complaining that they have to suffer things like this because they are men and that it isn’t fair.

It is normal and natural for men to do the hard jobs and to provide; it is something they are much better suited for than women and usually feel called to do. It’s really the flip side of women complaining that they are disadvantaged by having to be the ones to bear children. It’s like some of the MRAs want a male version of feminism, a liberation from traditional male roles, rather than a return of women to more traditional roles. No thanks. Everyone needs to accept that each sex has both disadvantages and advantages, both weaknesses and strengths. There really are traits that are more dominant or common to one sex or the other. We cannot be the same no matter how much people try. And everyone would be a lot happier if they would stop trying.

Also, all the unfair things that happen to men in family custody and child-support battles were called out in need of reform. The problem here is that they are right in describing this all as a problem, but the solution isn’t in some sort of band-aid of court reform. Men and women need to stop the behaviors that lead to this sort of difficulty: in other words, return to Christian morality, get married and stay married and only have children in that context. Unfortunately, as long as people choose not to follow that model, there will be no good answer to what happens when two people who aren’t going to stay or get married have kids. It’s a guaranteed disaster with far-reaching consequences.

Jaye, as a feminist, expected to confirm that the MRAs were misogynists, and she was surprised to be disproved. Coming from a completely different perspective as an anti-feminist, I expected I would be sympathetic to the MRAs, but I felt less sympathetic than I thought I would. I understood some of their complaints, especially against what feminists have done to our society and to men, but when they turned to what sounded like a rejection of traditional male roles and started to sound like the male equivalent of feminists, they lost me.

***

Here is Cassie Jaye explaining why she no longer calls herself a feminist:

After reading Vox’s Why Mother’s Matter and the ensuing comments, I’m left feeling not particularly hopeful about the state of affairs between the sexes. It was the comments not Vox’s post that I found troubling. A few women dared to post and were pretty much told to shut up, accused of “bitching” and trying to “shame” men (though there were some positive responses). I thought the women’s responses, mostly agreeing with Vox but just adding their perspective, were reasonable. In a nutshell: if you expect women to change, to return to more traditional ways and submit to men, you men had better change too.

Vox affirms the importance of mothers, especially full-time mothers, in raising the next generation and being instrumental in fighting the culture war, but many of the responses were apparently from angry, bitter men who hate women. Men claim to be the rational, unemotional ones, but often come across as big crybabies and respond quite irrationally (and even emotionally, though it looks different from women’s emotion — newsflash: anger is an emotion too). They claim women are the needy ones, but whine about their needs and how they can’t get what they want out of life. They feel justified in outlining what women are doing wrong and should change, but get all bent of of shape if a (gasp!) woman notes some ways men should change. If you want to offer constructive criticism to the opposite sex, fine, but you better be able to take it too.

Our current cultural state, feminism, etc. has ruined things for BOTH sexes. If you want to restore Western Civilization, stop making the opposite sex your enemy — that’s just playing into the feminist tactic to divide and conquer. Stop crying victim and refusing to recognize that women too are victims in this. And if you’re a man who says this isn’t true and that men have been the worse victims and that a woman can’t possibly understand what’s it like to be a man in this world today, well, maybe, but what makes you think you have a clue about what it’s like to be a woman now? There’s a reason men are sterotypically seen as clueless about women.

I’ve recently been thinking about humility and how lack of it contributes to many of the problems in our society and specifically, how it affects women. Lack of humility leads to women resisting being put in a “lower” position to men and the idea of submitting to or serving a man in any way. Hierarchy is seen as evil. Part of this is feminist indoctrination of course, that even the most conservatively raised woman has picked up from the surrounding culture to some extent. But it also stems from the desire to be special or important (and who doesn’t want to feel this way at least sometimes?). Everyone seems to want to be a leader, an achiever, to accomplish great things. No one wants to serve or admit that they’re not as good as someone else. No one just wants to wash the dishes and change diapers — things that on the surface accomplish nothing of lasting value and have to be done over and over again — and never hear a word of affirmation.

Being told that one is only fit for lowly things isn’t exactly a charming proposition. Men who reject feminist women and want a meek, little wife, but complain about women as stupid bitches who must be put in their place are idiots. Who would want to sign up for a life full of drudgery, be considered unimportant, and get to be, not a life-partner or equal companion, but little more than a dumb slave? You want women to return to traditional ways? You better make it sound more attractive than the fantasy of power and success held out by feminists.

There has to be a benefit for women to giving up their freedom and independence, and let’s be honest, a woman today is taking as big risk on today’s men as a man is taking on today’s women (statistics aside about women initiating more divorces – they might be the instigator but they’ve just ruined their own lives too). Pretty much everyone is damaged goods in some way and no one wants to get hurt. If today’s women have been trained to be over-critical of men and have too-high, unrealistic expectations of men and marriage, today’s men aren’t exactly the most attractive, paragons of virtue either, not exactly the kind of strong men who would inspire life-long devotion and submission.

If you men want to be served and submitted to, you have to offer something in return, and yes that includes fidelity, security, and at least a little affection. Sensible women will settle for less than perfection (a lot less); they’ll give up ideas of romance or having a soul mate or even a good friend in their spouse — and considering the lies woman have been led to believe, think what a hard pill that is to swallow. Even for women who aren’t so sensible, is it really all their fault that they’ve been fed a pack of lies all their lives? There are plenty of women who “wake up” and realize this. I’d say a little humility on all sides could help, starting with not demonizing the other.

Having the sexes at each other’s throats isn’t the way to ensure the survival of Western Civilization. Vox is on the right track to recognize the importance of mothers and give them a little credit for the hard work they do. Some of his commenters however have got it all wrong. The relationship between the sexes is so messed up I don’t know how to fix it — but I’m only woman after all, what would I know?

But it is most interesting that Mr. Dreher barely talks about the curriculum of public elementary and secondary schools. He emphasizes, instead, the peer culture of the school environment. Christian parents may try very hard, but everything can be undone by “the toxic peer culture” of public schools. In addition, the parents themselves may neither understand nor be capable of resisting. The effects are pervasive. Mr. Dreher quotes communications to him from parents of children in public schools who describe the startling number of public-school students who have come to believe that that they are transgender or bisexual. In the bluntest statement of his whole book, and one aimed directly at Christian parents, Mr. Dreher asserts that “two or three hours of religious education weekly is unlikely to counteract the forty or more hours spent in school or school-related programming.” The conclusion: Christian parents should remove their children from public schools.

A senior in a large public high school located in a major western city recently told this reviewer that he did not know any Christians at his school. Now, since there are obviously students there who are Christians, that means that the Christian students never identify themselves as Christians nor say or do anything identifiably Christian. Plainly, those students think that a public school is not an environment where it is appropriate or even permissible to be an open Christian. So, we may ask, if you never express who you really are, aren’t you inevitably changing who you really are?

***

In order to combine Christian education with an education in the liberal learning of Western civilization, Mr. Dreher endorses the classical Christian school movement and gives both Catholic and Evangelical examples. If such schools are too expensive or not available, the alternative is to homeschool.

I couldn’t agree more that the public schools in our country are a disaster and the best thing you could do for your kids is to keep them out. Here are a couple recent examples of the sort of negative influences in school he’s talking about.

Together with her attorneys, this brave ninth grader is asking for the right to express her faith, which is already guaranteed to her by the Constitution. Students should never have to check their beliefs at the school house door — or anywhere else for that matter.

Emily Zinos writes “A ‘transgender’ kindergartner registered at my kids’ school. That’s when the madness began.” She goes on to describe what happened in her school district: the school’s attempts at accommodation, the “trans” kid’s parents suing anyway, school sponsored meetings telling the rest of the parents they had to comply and when these parents funded a meeting to counterpoint the school’s presentation, “Well over a hundred local pro-LGBTQ protesters came to the presentation, prompting the local police to send a sergeant and two patrolling squads as protection.” Because tolerance, folks!

The rest of Ms. Zinos’ article is interesting, especially that a group of feminists has joined the fight against transgender activism because of common ground of ensuring the rights of biological women. Here is her conclusion about what’s happening in the schools:

institutionalizing gender ideology will require that schools ignore the evidence that it causes real harm to children. You can’t extol the virtues of gender ideology and question its soundness at the same time. By celebrating transgenderism as a valid identity, schools are promoting a body-mind disconnect that may very well bring on the gender dysphoric state they were attempting to prevent. And when the widely accepted “affirmative” medical treatments of gender dysphoria in children are both poorly studied and glaringly injurious, we have nothing to celebrate.

Make no mistake, schools that endorse and celebrate transgenderism as valid are endorsing child abuse.

Given examples like those (and those are only two, only the tip of the ice berg where trans-issues are but one problem among many), I’d say Dreher isn’t wrong about the state of education in America. He also opines that most of the American colleges may be beyond saving – unless they are replaced by truer places of secondary learning. What about his other ideas?

Mr. Dreher, who visited the Benedictine monastery at Nursia, Italy, in preparing his book, holds that the Rule is a “manual of practices, and its precepts simple and “plain enough to be adapted by lay Christians for their own use.” He derives eight main principles from the Rule and states why each would literally be a godsend for Christians in the modern, secular world. Against the disorder and loss of tradition of the modern world, the first principle is that it is order—ordered daily life, rather than today’s randomness—that sets the stage for “internal order.”

The second is prayer. “Prayer is the life of the soul,” Mr. Dreher quotes a Benedictine monk, and time must be set aside for it. The monastic emphasis on regular, daily prayer is the precisely needed antidote to the maniacal busyness of the contemporary world. Echoing the standard understanding of the role of prayer in Christian life, Mr. Dreher suggests that “if we spend all our time in activity, even when that activity serves Christ, and neglect prayer and contemplation, we put our faith in danger.”

Third, against the intellectualizing of everything today, Benedict’s Rule understands that the involvement of the body in manual labor is an essential part of human work. Again, Christians today, having been forced out of some of the professions, may have to resort to more labor by hand, Mr. Dreher concludes.

Fourth, contrary to the supreme modern principle of satisfying one’s own desires, “relearning asceticism—that is, how to suffer for the faith—is critical training for Christians living in the world today and the world of the near future.”

Fifth, even that most monastic principle of stability—that is, staying in one place—has some relevance to lay Christians, for what is the overall benefit of our constant mobility?

Sixth is community, the human architecture of a monastery, but also of a family, a neighborhood, a city, a society, and a polity. We readers might add to Mr. Dreher’s analysis the observation that we now increasingly live without a sense of shared life, without a “collective consciousness,” as Emile Durkheim put it. We are “free, equal, and independent,” but, pace John Locke, we are alone.

Seventh, contrary to Mr. Dreher’s critics and to a true understanding of the Rule, hospitality is a daily duty not only of monastic life but also of lay Christian life. Pilgrims and visitors are to “be received like Christ.” But hospitality, like all the virtues, must be practiced with prudence and according to the other principles of the Rule. A visitor cannot disturb or disrupt the community.

Mr. Dreher adds an eighth principle—balance, partly derived from the Benedictines but also from his own reflection and observation. By being too strict, some Christian communities have fallen apart or become “cultlike.” On the other hand, since abandonment to the will of God is the goal, Christian communities cannot be based on “spiritual mediocrity.”

US feminists are being one-upped by the vulgarity and blasphemy of the Argentine feminists. International Women’s Day was just marked in the US by encouraging women to protest “inequality” and stay home from work or otherwise shirk responsibilities, not by staging a “bloody fake abortion on a woman dressed as Virgin Mary.”

Feminists in pink masks pretended to commit an abortion on a woman dressed as the Virgin Mary outside a northern Argentina cathedral as part of an International Women’s Day protest last week…

Meanwhile, in Buenos Aires, participants in an International Women’s Day march tried to set the city’s cathedral on fire. They attacked a lone man who held a Vatican flag and tried to defend the cathedral.

Yet again these “ladies” show their priorities. How does insulting an important female holy figure further female “empowerment?” Perverting and insulting the image of the Virgin Mary doesn’t exactly translate into empowering or respecting women.